Tate Taylor (2014)
I knew next to nothing about James Brown’s life and very few of his songs – I know ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ (or a bit of it anyway) only because it was used as the soundtrack for a commercial I saw repeatedly at the cinema. So I’ve no idea whether this biographical film is accurate in factual detail, or in its presentation of Brown either as a performer or in his life offstage. Tate Taylor, working from a screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, jumps backwards and forwards in telling Brown’s story. Perhaps the fluid narrative is meant to reflect the genre-crossing musical talents of its subject but it left me wondering if a linear structure had been avoided in order to obscure the thinness of the script. Get on Up seems like a collection of scenes from the life of James Brown. It doesn’t build as a biography although it isn’t above biopic cliché: as the protagonist becomes a star, power goes to his head and he alienates those who love him. (Because the rise to fame isn’t structured conventionally, Taylor denies himself the impact of suggesting that Brown was a user and an egomaniac from strikingly early in his career: this occurred to me only after the film was over and I started rearranging its scenes in my head in chronological order.) The disease of superstardom reaches its climax in a familiar way. Brown (Chadwick Boseman) and his long-time, long-suffering colleague Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) have a row on the stage of an otherwise deserted theatre. Brown derides Byrd’s inability to be a successful solo artist and tells him he’s no longer needed. As he walks out, Byrd tells Brown, ‘You already alone’, and the camera pans across the empty seats of the auditorium.
According to Wikipedia, Chadwick Boseman sings some of the numbers but mimes to Brown’s voice on others. I haven’t seen Boseman before and found it hard to tell from this film how good an actor he is: he sounds much of the time as if he’s putting on his speaking voice but he’s certainly an excitingly kinetic dancer. Tate Taylor has Boseman speak regularly to camera – a device which seems less designed to create complicity with the audience than to assume that it’s predisposed in James Brown’s favour, which may well be the case for many viewers of Get on Up. The scenes from Brown’s childhood have, at least compared with the rest of the film, an emotional depth – thanks to Jamarion and Jordan Scott, who play the child James, Octavia Spencer as his aunt and, especially, Viola Davis as James’s mother, Susie, who walks out when he’s a young boy. Tate Taylor knows from The Help what he can get from Davis and Spencer and, although neither role involves much screen time, makes the most of them here. The truthfulness of these actresses and the Scott boys is effective in giving Brown’s life story a grounding that stays with you. Davis is also remarkable in a scene, decades later, when Susie arrives backstage following a performance that James Brown has just given with his band, the Famous Flames. Brown isn’t sure whether this woman claiming to be his mother is telling the truth. Viola Davis somehow manages to sow the same uncertainty in the viewer’s mind – without the help of obviously disguising make-up. By contrast, when elderly versions of James Brown and Bobby Byrd meet up, it’s hard to tell if their weird appearance is less than good ageing make-up or a comment on the pair’s financial ability to have cosmetic surgery. (In the same scene, a white man is cleaning Byrd’s swimming pool and this causes Brown to remark, reasonably enough, that times have changed when a black man can employ a white one to keep his place tidy.) The large cast also includes Dan Aykroyd as Brown’s manager and Allison Janney in an extraordinarily vivid cameo as a racist hotel guest.
At 139 minutes, Get on Up is, for me, unnecessarily long but that’s largely because I’m not keen on the soundtrack. There’s a scene in the film which I think I’ll remember because it helped clarify for me why I don’t much like listening to Brown – or plenty of other greats of soul, funk, rhythm and blues. The R&B producer and talent scout Ralph Bass (Josh Hopkins) is trying to persuade the music executive Syd Nathan (Fred Melamed) of the merits of what became one of James Brown’s most famous songs, ‘Please, Please, Please’. ‘He’s just repeating “please”’, says the baffled Nathan. ‘“Please” – what? “Please pay my rent”? Where’s the song?’ ‘It isn’t about the song, Syd’, replies the exasperated Ralph Bass, ‘it isn’t about the song …’ I suppose that for me it is always about the song. This is why I like pop melodies and their interpretation and don’t like music that’s all about the domination of a voice, however amazing that voice may be.
24 November 2014
